The book now in the reader’s hands is the first English translation of Mathematical Know-how, the best and most popular puzzle book ever published in the Soviet Union. Since its first appearance in 1956, there have been eight editions, as well as translations from the original Russian into Ukrainian, Estonian, Lettish, and Lithuanian. Almost a million copies of the Russian version alone have been sold.

Outside the U.S.S.R., the book has been published in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, France, China, Japan, and Korea.

The author, Boris A. Kordemsky, who was born in 1907, is a talented high school mathematics teacher in Moscow. His first book on recreational mathematics, The Wonderful Square, a delightful discussion of curious properties of the ordinary geometric square, was published in Russian in 1952. In 1958, his Essays on Challenging Mathematical Problems appeared. In collaboration with an engineer, he produced a picture book for children, Geometry Aids Arithmetic (1960), which by lavish use of color overlays, shows how simple diagrams and graphs can be used in solving arithmetic problems. His Foundations of the Theory of Probabilities appeared in 1964, and in 1967, he collaborated on a textbook about vector algebra and analytic geometry. But it is for his mammoth puzzle collection that Kordemsky is best known in the Soviet Union, and rightly so, for it is a marvelously varied assortment of brain teasers.

 Admittedly, many of the book’s puzzles will be familiar in one form or another to puzzle buffs who know Western literature, especially the works of England’s Henry Ernest Dudeney and America’s Sam Loyd. However, Kordemsky has given the old puzzles new angles and has presented them in such amusing and charming story forms that it is a pleasure to come upon them again. The story backgrounds incidentally convey a valuable impression of contemporary Russian life and customs. Moreover, mixed with the known puzzles are many that will be new to Western readers, some of them no doubt invented by Kordemsky himself.

The only other Russian writer on recreational mathematics and science who can be compared with Kordemsky is Yakov I. Perelman (1882-1942). In addition to books on recreational arithmetic, algebra, and geometry, Perelman wrote similar books on mechanics, physics, and astronomy. Paperback editions of Perelman’s works are still widely sold throughout the U.S.S.R. However, Kordemsky’s book is now regarded as the outstanding puzzle collection in the history of Russian mathematics.

The translation of Kordemsky’s book was made by Dr. Albert Parry, former chairman of Russian Studies at Colgate University, and more recently at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Parry is a distinguished American scholar of Russian origin whose many books range from the early Garrets and Pretenders (a colorful history of American bohemianism) to a biography entitled Whistler's Father (the father of the painter was a pioneer railroad builder in prerevolutionary Russia), and The New Class Divided, a comprehensive, authoritative account of the growing conflict in the Soviet Union between its scientific-technical elite and its ruling bureaucracy. 

 The original illustrations by Yevgeni Konstantinovich Argutinsky have been retained, with retouching where necessary, and Russian letters in the diagrams replaced by English letters. In brief, the book has been edited to make it as easy as possible for an English-reading public to understand and enjoy. More than 90 percent of the original material has been retained, and every effort has been made to convey faithfully its warmth and humor. I hope that the result will provide many weeks or even months of entertainment for all who enjoy such problems.